What the storyteller does is to look at the world with all of its brokenness and all of its problems and write a story. The story is where we look for the truth of a matter. I do not believe that we need to protect our children from language which they already know, from the horrors of the world which they already know.

Continuing to use Billy Collins's poem "Introduction to Poetry" as a stanza-by-stanza field guide for reading poetry, we'll now take a look at my personal favorite: sound.

Here is the entire second stanza. Ready?

or press an ear against its hive

I've never pressed my ear to a literal beehive, but I've been close enough to a swarm of bees to feel that unsettling--yet delicious--hum in my bones. Sounds sock us in the gut, but we can't always explain why.

Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds.